The Setting of the Sundown Kid

The Connecticut Senate found a solution to its budget stalemate on a Friday evening in 1971. But a crucial vote, 27-year-old Joseph Lieberman, had gone home to celebrate the Sabbath. At Majority Leader Ed Caldwell’s direction, the chamber delayed the vote, observed the day of rest, and passed the budget Saturday night. The next day’s Bridgeport Post carried a pithy headline: “Butch Caldwell and the Sundown Kid.”

Lieberman, who died last week at 82, recounted this story in his 2011 book, “The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath.” “For me,” he wrote, “Sabbath observance is one of the greatest gifts of my life.” Jewish law prohibits the use of electronic devices, as well as traveling by car, on the Sabbath. Every Friday before sunset, his wife, Hadassah, would kindle candles so that the “older, gentler, and timeless light” replaced “the modern, sharp, and artificial light of the computer, the television, and the BlackBerry screen.”

He insisted that the rules of the Sabbath ensured spiritual liberty. “Every generation has its own pharaoh and its own slave masters uniquely based on the culture of the time,” he wrote. “Our pharaoh may be the electronic devices—computers, televisions, iPhones—that mesmerize us, dominating hour after hour of our lives. . . . Too often they show us an electronic alternative reality full of negativity, trivia, or degradation. From all this, the Sabbath offers to free us for a twenty-four-hour period.”

The Sabbath brought freedom, which, counterintuitively, rigorous Jewish law helped secure. The obligations outlined in the Talmud, Lieberman reflected, make the Sabbath what it is and “protect it as a day of faith and rest.” They also had implications for his professional life. When a vital vote kept Lieberman late in the U.S. Capitol on a Friday, he would have to walk 4.5 miles to his Georgetown home, sometimes escorted by Capitol police in soaking rain or terrible cold.

Read the full article at The Wall Street Journal [subscription may be required].